Vanishing Roads and Other Essays eBook

with all ignoble use”—­and to be the
possessor in a considerable degree of that mysterious
“sight” or sixth sense attributed to men
and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a
curious story of his mood immediately preceding that
flight to the Isles of which I have been writing.
He had been haunted the night before by the sound
of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it
splashing in the night against the walls of his London
dwelling. So real it had seemed that he had risen
from his bed and looked out of the window, and even
in the following afternoon, in his study, he could
still hear the waves dashing against the house.
“A telegram had come for him that morning,”
writes Mrs. Sharp, “and I took it to his study.
I could get no answer. I knocked, louder, then
louder,—­at last he opened the door with
a curiously dazed look in his face. I explained.
He answered: ’Ah, I could not hear you
for the sound of the waves!’”

His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness
in this connection. Writing of his death on the
12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: “About
three o’clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood
by his side, he suddenly leant forward with shining
eyes and exclaimed in a tone of joyous recognition,
‘Oh, the beautiful “Green Life,”
again!’ and the next moment sank back in my
arms with the contented sigh, ’Ah, all is well!’”

“The green life” was a phrase often on
Sharp’s lips, and stood for him for that mysterious
life of elemental things to which he was almost uncannily
sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely
to merge himself, of which too his writings as “Fiona
Macleod” prove him to have had “invisible
keys.” It is this, so to say, conscious
pantheism, this kinship with the secret forces and
subtle moods of nature, this responsiveness to her
mystic spiritual “intimations,” that give
to those writings their peculiar significance and
value. In the external lore of nature William
Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer
in English, with the exceptions of George Meredith
and Grant Allen, was his equal here, and his knowledge
had been gained, as such knowledge can only be gained,
in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood
of which he has thus written: “From fifteen
to eighteen I sailed up every loch, fjord, and inlet
in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran and
Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the
Rhinns of Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland.
Wherever I went I eagerly associated myself with fishermen,
sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, gypsies,
wandering pipers, and other musicians.”
For two months he had “taken the heather”
with, and had been “star-brother” and “sun-brother”
to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered
variously in many lands, absorbing the wonder and
the beauty of the world. Well might he write
to Mrs. Janvier: “I have had a very varied,
and, to use a much abused word, a very romantic life
in its internal as well as in its external aspects.”
Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and
from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be
true, in the words of his friend Walter Pater, that
“to burn ever with this hard gem-like flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,”
then indeed the life of William Sharp was a nobly
joyous success.